There was CGI, Java and even C. But for building Web sites during the dot-com boom, nothing was hotter than ColdFusion.

Created by Allaire more than a decade ago, ColdFusion enabled Web 1.0 developers to quickly build sophisticated Web sites whose Web pages -- easily identified by the .cfm at the end of the page name -- were generated on-the-fly via a back-end database, rather than hardcoded using HTML.

ColdFusion also won over developers by letting them "get to a higher level of abstraction above the code so they could build things faster," said Peter O'Kelly, an analyst with The Burton Group. "The Allaire brothers were way ahead of the curve."

At its peak, ColdFusion vied with JavaScript for popularity with Web programmers, according to a 1998 survey by IDC.

But while JavaScript -- the 'J' in AJAX -- is still hot, ColdFusion cooled down rapidly after the dot-com crash.

As dot-coms went out of business and were replaced by thriftier Web 2.0 startups, ColdFusion's relatively high cost hurt.

Though ColdFusion has long had a free developer edition, production licenses for the latest ColdFusion 8 cost from £789 plus VAT for a standard boxed copy.

Meanwhile, a multitude of free or open-source tools existed for the languages that gradually supplanted ColdFusion. They include PERL, Python, PHP, (the 'P' in the LAMP software stack for open-source Web servers) Ruby on Rails and even ASP.Net, Microsoft's own entry into this space.

"The market went nuts for ColdFusion and Java in the 1990s. Then there was a backlash, with everyone embracing scripting languages as being 'good enough,'" O'Kelly said.

According to TIOBE Software's ranked list of programming languages, ColdFusion ranks only 28th in terms of estimated popularity.

ColdFusion also slipped after Macromedia acquired ColdFusion in 2001.

Recognizing, according to Buntel, that the "application server was being commoditized," Macromedia right after the acquisition focused on rebuilding ColdFusion into a Java-based (J2EE) application server.

The problem, admits Kevin Lynch, Macromedia and now Adobe's chief software architect, is that "there weren't a lot of new features coming out, as we were just making it work with Java."

Not dead, just... stealthy

Back in May, our sister site Computerworld listed ColdFusion, along with cc:Mail and OS/2, in an article about "The top 10 dead or dying computer skills."

Indeed, ColdFusion is still used by about 400,000 developers, according to Tim Buntel, ColdFusion's longtime marketing manager during an interview at Adobe's MAX user conference in Chicago earlier this week.

Changing user demographics -- as consumer Web startups abandoned ColdFusion, enterprises and large organizations kept using it for private intranets -- created the perception of a greater decline than actually occurred, Buntel said.

"We have much deeper penetration for enterprise apps that are behind the firewall," Buntel said.

But he also conceded that the lack of momentum around ColdFusion has hurt sales.

ColdFusion "is not a lost cause, marketing-wise," he said. "But it has been a challenge for us to find an exciting new story to share with people."

"There's only one ColdFusion class here and it's not in the computer science department," said Michael De Jonghe, a ColdFusion programmer at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering.

Getting schools to teach ColdFusion "has been a challenge," Buntel said. "But since we were bought by Adobe in 2005, we are starting to see more schools teaching ColdFusion again."

While design software remains Adobe's bread-and-butter, the firm is turning towards programming tools to drive future profits. But with Adobe spending most of their effort evangelizing Flash, Flex and Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), where does that leave ColdFusion?

In a good position, according to Buntel. Rather than quietly retiring ColdFusion, Adobe is re-investing in it. ColdFusion 8 was released in August as a rapid AJAX-enabled Web development platform whose applications can be repurposed for other Adobe technologies such as Flash or AIR with minimal recoding.

ColdFusion 8 is available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows Server 2003. Its main new features include integration with Adobe Acrobat forms, Adobe Acrobat Connect and Microsoft .Net, as well as built-in server monitoring in the enterprise edition.

Hometown Quotes, an insurance Web portal operator based in Franklin, Tenn., has been testing ColdFusion 8 as part of Adobe's beta program.

"There's a misconception that ColdFusion is not as good as ASP.Net," said Braden Lake, Hometown's vice-president of technology. "But ColdFusion 8 really brings Web 2.0 home."

Can ColdFusion regain its former glory? There are some encouraging signs. ColdFusion 8 sales so far are tracking higher than previous versions, according to Adobe.

As part of ColdFusion 8's launch, Adobe created a dedicated team for selling ColdFusion.

24,000 new users have downloaded the ColdFusion trial in the last two months, Buntel said.

Development is also underway on ColdFusion 9, codenamed "Centuar," according to Kevin Lynch, though he declined to share details.

"Basically, if a developer just wants to build dynamically-generated HTML apps with a little bit of AJAX thrown in, they are not going to be drawn to ColdFusion," Buntel said. "But if they also want to use a lot of Adobe's client technologies, then we have a good story."